As Hurricane Ian passed through the area, we fared pretty well overall – we’re far enough inland and, even though it passed closer than all predictions up until less than a day ahead of time, it had lost most of its energy by the time it hit central NC. We heard gusting winds from time to time, but not terribly fierce, and all that dropped in the yard were small branches (and acorns – thousands of acorns, from just one tree.) Power blipped several times, preventing me from tackling any computer projects because the sudden disappearance of my work was something that I wanted to avoid, but it never stayed out more than a minute; I spent more time resetting clocks (multiple times) than that.
The storm did halt some of our plans, but so did some unidentified illness that sapped all of my energy, so it shares the blame. No, the noticeable impact came from losing internet connection, which lasted for two days – I’d say that’s why you weren’t seeing posts, but I’ve gone longer than that with no good excuses so I’m not going to draw your attention to this. And while I’ve always felt that I could fare reasonably well without being as ‘connected’ as most people with their Instashit and Spybook and burying their noses in their dicks smutphones constantly, this kind of drove home how much I actually rely on the internet. Not social media, but it’s my main info and entertainment source, and I spent a lot of time thinking, Well, I could – no, that won’t work, and, I’ll just look up – no I won’t either, and, Why don’t I – nope, forget it. I still had a data connection on my own smutphone, but this is a remarkably frustrating experience because it’s incredibly slow and sporadic, partially from a weak connection here, but also because phones fucking suck for browsing the internet or, indeed, typing any damn thing at all into them. I can say that the outage at least held off until I got past a semi-emergency session of harassing both Travel Inn and Booking.com over their inability to provide the basic services that they advertise, and thus will heartily recommend that you never do business with either of these corporations.
This outage/delay really did have an impact herein, however, in that I finally had some decent stuff to post about and could only edit the photos and consider what I would write – that’s coming up shortly.
What does this have to do with the image here? Oh, not a damn thing – I just had it sitting in the blog folder for not quite seven years and decided to finally use it, since nothing topical had arisen in that time. Just a simple image, but you find a spot where such funky little pine cones all line up so nicely. Until then, save your sneering.